moralizing

Our world must have reeked of tobacco smoke: clothes, curtains, walls, upholstery, the air we breathed (a smoker today is instantly recognizable by the smell of his clothes, and a secondhand book formerly owned by a smoker is likewise recognizable). Smokers, in my experience, are reluctant to understand just how unpleasant or disturbing nonsmokers find their habit, though they claim, perhaps not without some justification, that conviviality has declined with the decline in smoking. Certainly, there are no more smoke-filled rooms.

My neighbor called out to me as I started walking back to the house after rolling the trash out for the next morning’s pickup. “Come on in where it’s warm,” he said as I walked up his steps. He wanted to talk to me about a potential job. Twenty minutes later, when I got home, my clothes didn’t pass the sniff test. Into the wash they went. He hadn’t even been smoking while I was there. The air in his living room was just permeated with the smog of thousands of previously-smoked cigarettes.

I was born a smoker, my mom having started several years earlier. My secondhand habit continued until I was ten, when she quit after receiving a health scare. She had blood in her urine, and after running a series of tests, her doctor came back into the room, looked at his clipboard, glanced up at her, and shook his head slowly. In that moment, she was sure he was going to tell her she had cancer, and she quickly prayed to the God she’d stopped officially worshiping, promising Him that she’d quit if only He let her live. As it happened, the doctor’s head-shake was one of puzzlement, because the tests were all clear. It eventually turned out that she’d been taking several aspirin per day for years to deal with the headaches that smoking caused her, which explained the blood from her stomach lining. Nevertheless, she did indeed quit cold turkey that day (reinforcing the fact that “addiction” is hardly the neurochemical determinism it’s typically made out to be). After that, she would perform her disgust when encountering smokers in public, conspicuously fanning the air and making exasperated noises of disapproval, thus replacing the buzz of nicotine with the rush of moral superiority.

Smoking has long since become an issue about many things besides itself. Conquerors often romanticize the conquered, and smoking has to some extent been repurposed as a defiant middle finger raised against the health-conscious liberal elite and its prissy quest for endless self-improvement. Few people might want to champion smoking as a practice, but they still see it as a useful tool of cultural criticism. Smoking has become something of a countercultural symbol of “real working folks” authenticity and nostalgia for a bygone ritual whereby people valued camaraderie more than the purity of their own lungs. Liberalism’s emphasis on individual autonomy logically extends to our personal airspace, which we defend as zealously as any nation-state against hostile invaders. Why should I have to suffer the costs of your choices? The logic is sound as far as it goes, but where it goes is to a world of social atomization, where obligations are contractual and easily enough dissolved when inconvenient. And as my mom could tell you, few things are as satisfying as being judgmental or cruel toward those who can be confidently said to have “deserved” their treatment. I shouldn’t have to wash the stale reek of cheap tobacco out of my clothes, or suffer an irritated throat for a couple hours, but sometimes it’s just more important to be neighborly than to be right.

There are a lot of different views on climate change on the right. (I myself am mostly in the Matt Ridley “lukewarmer” camp.) But he ignores all of the competing views in favor of an argument that amounts to little more than fan service for liberal readers. One can believe that climate change is a real concern, with some legitimate science on its side, while also believing there is a range of available policy options that do not conform to the liberal party line and declining to act in a spirit of righteous panic. (Noah Rothman notes how the enlightened position on climate change must always be even more “hysteria.”)

I have dogmatic family members who typically take the talk-radio party line on the political issue du jour. You know the type — they greet every snow flurry with triumphant cackling and a hearty chorus of SCREW YOU AL GORE. It’s probably fair to call them “deniers,” since their positions are usually reflexively determined by whatever they perceive to be the official stance of liberal elites. But the Lady of the House has a cousin, a geologist, who visited us at the beginning of the month. While we were hiking, she succinctly summarized her view on climate change: “Is it happening? Yes. Is human activity contributing to it? Most likely. Is there anything we can realistically do about it? Probably not.” She’s not actually a conservative, but among the conservatives I read and talk to, I find that to be a fairly typical view. One of them had a useful rule of thumb for weeding out the cranks — if they’re opposed to fossil fuels but refuse to even countenance the idea of nuclear power, they’re not serious enough to bother with. It may well be that I’m just inclined to hear what I want to hear, but I find the stoic pragmatism and lack of hysteria refreshing. As Auden said, we are changed by what we change. We’ll adapt, or we won’t, but when has that ever not been the case?

The received left-wing wisdom, by contrast — well, it’s usually facile to compare various beliefs and behaviors to religion, but in the case of climate change, I’m not sure what else to call it. As I mentioned before, I check in with The Week as part of my daily bookmark routine, to keep tabs on what the somewhat-sane left is talking about, and I’ve been amused to see the resident fire-and-brimstone fundamentalist Ryan Cooper pounding the pulpit recently. “Climate change is going to fry your state,” he thundered toward a heretical Utah senator. “Wealth cannot save you from climate change,” he warned us in the prior week’s sermon. Sinners in the hands of an angry Gaia, indeed. But for the clearest, most painstaking demonstration of how so much green activism is nothing but a surrogate outlet for moral evangelism, you can’t do better than read Peter Dorman’s steamrolling of Naomi Klein’s recent spasm of righteousness posing as a book, This Changes Everything. If this were a boxing match, it would have been stopped after the first few paragraphs.

I don’t have any strong views on climate change, but what I find most interesting and amusing is the idea that I should, like it’s a dereliction of my duty as a citizen to avoid pronouncing on events that I can’t influence. I couldn’t be more ordinary and anonymous. What practical use could I possibly make of a doctrinaire opinion? Too many people seem convinced that a diploma and an advantageous upbringing qualify them to serve as volunteer policymakers and amateur heads of state. I think I’d like it better if they devoted that time and energy to church activities.

Now that we’ve opened the door for ordinary users, politicians, ex-security-state creeps, foreign governments and companies like Raytheon to influence the removal of content, the future is obvious: an endless merry-go-round of political tattling, in which each tribe will push for bans of political enemies.

In about 10 minutes, someone will start arguing that Alex Jones is not so different from, say, millennial conservative Ben Shapiro, and demand his removal. That will be followed by calls from furious conservatives to wipe out the Torch Network or Anti-Fascist News, with Jacobin on the way.

This is the nuance people are missing. It’s not that people like Jones shouldn’t be punished; it’s the means of punishment that has changed radically.

Under the new manorialism of our age, it’s moral authority and consensus which have splintered and withered, rather than political authority. The centralized state grows ever larger and more invasive with the help of technology, but the ability of citizens to communicate and informally settle their disputes inversely shrinks. Through laziness, cowardice, and general stupidity, we’ve abdicated our responsibility to order ourselves from within our social relationships, and have thus resigned ourselves to being governed from without by employers, bureaucrats, and corporate moguls. We’re content to be granted a steady job and a small plot of social-media turf to tend; whatever useful data we produce there is handed over to our lords, and occasionally we may be called upon to march off to battle with petitions and disingenuous boycotts against hostile media territories. In contrast to the previous era of manorialism, though, our corporate lords are not bound by any restraints or obligations regarding us. Your service on behalf of your liege will not protect you should a mob target your job or public reputation. There is no manor court system to grant any rudimentary protection.

It’s further evidence, perhaps, of Campbell and Manning’s argument that we are transforming from a culture of dignity to a culture of victimhood, where pride in one’s self-sufficiency gives way to toadying and currying favor with powerful authorities in the hope of convincing them to extract petty vengeance on our behalf. Additionally, it’s also perhaps further confirmation of a related theme Philip K. Howard developed over a pair of books, that responsibility and judgment decay as a legalistic bureaucratic culture grows. As we focus increasingly on individual rights to the exclusion of questions of responsibility, the imperative becomes covering one’s ass and looking for any legal loophole that can be cynically exploited. Sure, you have the right to declare personal economic embargoes against anyone for whatever vindictive reason you wish. Certainly, when you’re determined to parse it closely enough, no one has a right to a particular job or platform. The question, as always, is whether or not the purported cure is worse than the disease, or, more importantly, whether empowering faceless corporate entities to exercise judgment on our behalf will turn out to be far more costly than we expected. In the new manorial landscape we’re cheerfully creating, where only the independently wealthy can speak their minds or act without fear of crippling social sanctions, whom do you expect to thrive? To ask the question is to answer it.

Ah, progressivism. Where gender and biology are fluid, but language is static. To quote the Red Queen, “It’s too late to correct it. When you’ve once said a thing, that fixes it, and you must take the consequences.” If the word was once associated with racism, it will be forever tainted and irredeemable, a linguistic landmine lying in wait to macroaggressively maim the unwary. We saw this with beards as well. No, wait, come to think of it, pronouns change with the wind these days, too. Maybe it’s only proper nouns that work like this. Yeah, that must be it. Otherwise, the only logical conclusion is that this is all just a society-wide game of Calvinball, where the only consistent aim is to be the group in charge of declaring when and how the rules change, and that’s just too awful to contemplate.

Thomas Sowell put it most clearly in one of his books — the characteristic thing about this progressive crusading is its desire to not only end suffering and injustice here and now, but its desire to erase the past as well. He didn’t mean “erase” in the Orwellian memory-hole sense, although that tendency certainly exists too. He meant that they’re attempting to cancel the past out, by re-creating what they imagine to be the original Edenic conditions that would have existed had not patriarchy, capitalism, racism, and all the other assorted evils from Pandora’s jar escaped to wreak havoc throughout history. They postulate an original world intended to resemble a maudlin John Lennon song, tabulate all the ways in which it fell short, and then attempt to create the conditions of that world in the present through social engineering. From affirmative action to privilege-checking via language-policing and all points in between, the goal is to reduce “unjust” disparities, but, as you may be noticing, in this worldview, it’s an axiom that all disparities are unjust. Had things been truly fair and equal from the start as they should have been, no disparities would have arisen to begin with.

It should go without saying that this is the type of idea normally found inhabiting pungent clouds of marijuana cannabis smoke. In the commonly-recognized reality, all we can do to atone for shameful actions is to learn from them and do better from this day forward. What’s done can’t be undone. The end of racism will be when we stop practicing racist behavior, not when we expunge every last object, habit, word or idea that may once have been tangentially connected to something racist, however much they may have evolved since then. But unfortunately, the Handicapper General ideal is what underlies the aggregate logic of progressivism, in which a poorly-conceived-and-defined “equality” requires that all officially-recognized victims be “raised up” to wherever they would “naturally” be, had they not been victimized. In practice, though, it’s much easier to remove existing privileges from those who possess them, especially as they didn’t “deserve” them in the first place. To end unjust discrimination, we’ll need to “progressively” discriminate for “better” reasons until, by smoke, mirrors, and dialectical magic, we finally arrive at a point where no one ever needs to unjustly discriminate against anyone. In this instance, it’s not enough that pot legalization has become a mainstream issue; it doesn’t matter that absolutely nobody uses the word “marijuana” to conjure up racist fears of Mexicans; we still can’t be allowed to move forward until we have completely obliterated all traces of previous injustice, as if it never existed; hence, we need to stop using the contaminated term altogether. Again, to just go ahead and put too fine of a point on it, this is an idea so incoherent and delusional that it doesn’t deserve a rebuttal so much as a pillow held firmly over its face.

It’s amusingly ironic to me that a residual respect for the archetypal Old Testament-era prophet should be one of the aspects of our religious heritage to survive deep into our secular liberal age. What I mean is, there’s absolutely no reason anyone should take this social justice nonsense seriously. It’s self-evidently ignorant and counterproductive. And yet, articles like this are published every day and cheered by substantial numbers of influential people, because the authors are given the benefit of the doubt as to their “good intentions.” Sure, they may go a little too far in their zeal, but they mean well, and it’s good to have people filling that role as the moral conscience of a community, nation, etc., calling us to a higher standard and reproving us for our flaws. In reality, this has never been anything but the subtlest of power plays, in which a new class of aspiring mandarins realized that by declaring even the most innocuous things “problematic,” they could present themselves as the cure to their invented disease, and best of all, we’re supposed to believe that they will remain uncorrupted by the power that they refuse to trust anyone else with. It turns out that a “just” society requires their constant supervision and permission to function. Who’d’a thunk it?

If Weinstein’s name is to be removed from the credits of television shows in the production of which he played even a small part, what are we to do with the mountains of records, CDs, posters, books, memorabilia, commemorating rockers? What about the so-called “Rock and Roll Hall of Fame”? What is the point at which it becomes necessary for us to channel our inner Savonarolas and just start burning? Is one confirmed incident enough? How many Station to Stations or Physical Graffitis are worth the assault of a single woman or child? Are we affirming or materially contributing to their crimes when we watch films or listen to music made by abusers?

Like the rest of human life, sexuality has been subsumed over the course of the last few decades into the language of economics. The sexual act, we tell ourselves, is a simple matter of exchange between consenting partners, like a business transaction. It has nothing whatever to do with marriage or children. Like the deregulation of the economy, the privatization of sex has given us some apparent winners and a rather larger number of clear losers.

It’s hard to care how much has to burn for us to start listening to them.

That’s the problem with feeding frenzies. As entertaining as it may be to see an odious, degenerate elephant seal like Harvey Weinstein being torn apart by sharks, the blood in the water attracts all sorts of annoying smaller fish desperate to join in, and if they can’t get close enough to the intoxicating action, they’ll just turn and snap at anything within reach. Walther wants to extend the bloodlust to every celebrity who has committed similar offenses, so apparently we’re supposed to abstain from listening to the music of Don Henley, Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, Ted Nugent, Charlie Parker, and the Rolling Stones in solidarity with their victims. I presume he didn’t intend to present us with such an overwhelmingly white list of offenders, when such obvious (and arguably more relevant) candidates as Chuck Berry, Tupac Shakur, Nelly, Mystikal, and R. Kelly could have been included, but then again, feeding frenzies are dangerous places, and you don’t want to show up, eager to sink your teeth into a sexual predator, only to find yourself being devoured by the anti-racist barracudas.

Aldo Leopold, in his “Odyssey” essay, poetically demonstrated the interconnectedness of all life by describing a particular cycle in the existence of a nitrogen atom, from rock, to flower, to acorn, to deer, to Indian, “all in a single year,” and on and on. I mention it here in order to make a short metaphorical hop over to suggesting that Walther’s incoherent fantasy of isolating “bad” people in a moral quarantine is just that, a fantasy. What if, let’s just say ferzample, the cure for cancer ends up being discovered by a scientist who spent countless hours researching and experimenting while being inspired by listening to Led Zeppelin on repeat? Would that “justify” their music against whatever claims could be made against it on behalf of abused, underage groupies? What kind of imbecilic utilitarian (but I repeat myself) would even attempt to devise a calculus to meaningfully answer that inane question? Was the music of Bach or Mozart contaminated by the fact that commandants in Nazi death camps could force prisoners to play it for their entertainment? Shall we go on compiling similar examples? Like Leopold’s nitrogen atom, human lives and human creations restlessly zigzag across neat-and-tidy definitional boundaries, contributing to both good and bad in the world simultaneously. T’was ever thus, t’will forever be.

As Nietzsche said, “Beware all those in whom the urge to punish is powerful.” To people like Walther, it’s not important whether there’s any meaningful, accurate way in which moral credits and debits can be tallied when it comes to the production and consumption of music and films; what’s important is that he and people like him assume they’ll be the judges who make those decisions. But once the statues start toppling, and the records and books start burning, these moral purification rituals tend to take on a life and momentum of their own. He may be too stupid to realize that, or he may be cynically presenting a stupid, unworkable idea for the sake of meaningless Internet virtue points. I’m not sure which would be worse.

A lot of people without connections to the tech industry don’t realize how bad it’s gotten. This is how bad. It would be pointless trying to do anything about this person in particular. This is the climate.

Silicon Valley was supposed to be better than this. It was supposed to be the life of the mind, where people who were interested in the mysteries of computation and cognition could get together and make the world better for everybody. Now it’s degenerated into this giant hatefest of everybody writing long screeds calling everyone else Nazis and demanding violence against them. Where if someone disagrees with the consensus, it’s just taken as a matter of course that we need to hunt them down, deny them of the cloak of anonymity, fire them, and blacklist them so they can never get a job again. Where the idea that we shouldn’t be a surveillance society where we carefully watch our coworkers for signs of sexism so we can report them to the authorities is exactly the sort of thing you get reported to the authorities if people see you saying.

…Parts of tech are already this bad. For the rest of you: it’s what you have to look forward to.

He’s speaking, of course, of the reaction to the memo destined to live in infamy. “This person in particular” about whom it would be pointless to do anything is another Google employee ranting about Nazis, Nazis and the need to punch Nazis, namely the author of the memo. Because, as we know, the actual Nazis were famous for beginning their inter-party memos with statements like “I value diversity and inclusion.” It’s funny — I’ve read many good articles at National Review, but after a couple days of seeing the most wildly deranged and willfully dishonest reactions to the memo from progressives, this was the first time I’ve clicked over to N.R. and thought, “Oh, thank God!” They had several pieces up about the topic, and reading them was like discovering an oasis of sanity in a desert of hysteria. Ah, well. At this point, the conversation is several meta-levels above where it began. People rarely ever discuss the original point; they react to what they think the person might have been implying, and their opponents do likewise, and everyone just ends up screaming past each other yet again. It’s as if the children’s game of Telephone has become a full-contact sport.

In 1873, James Fitzjames Stephen wrote a book called Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, a philosophical assault on John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. Among many other criticisms, Stephen noted that Mill’s dream of a society that changed minds purely through gentle persuasion, not coercion, was a chimera. Debate all you want, Stephen said, but a clash of values will only end with one opponent finally bending the knee in submission and the majority of the onlookers shrugging their shoulders in indifference:

The custom of looking upon certain courses of conduct with aversion is the essence of morality, and the fact that this aversion may be felt by the very person whose conduct occasions it, and may be described as arising from the action of his own conscience, makes no difference which need be considered here. The important point is that such disapprobation could never have become customary unless it had been imposed upon mankind at large by persons who themselves felt it with exceptional energy, and who were in a position which enabled them to make other people adopt their principles and even their tastes and feelings.

Religion and morals, in a word, bear, even when they are at their calmest, the traces of having been established, as we know that in fact they were, by word of command. We have seen enough of the foundation of religions to know pretty well what is their usual course. A religion is first preached by a single person or a small body of persons. A certain number of disciples adopts it enthusiastically, and proceed to force their views upon the world by preaching, by persuasion, by the force of sympathy, until the new creed has become sufficiently influential and sufficiently well organized to exercise power both over its own members and beyond its own sphere….But, be the special form of religious power what it will, the principle is universally true that the growth of religions is in the nature of a conquest made by a small number of ardent believers over the lukewarmness, the indifference, and the conscious ignorance of the mass of mankind.

I’ve worried about this for a long time without coming any closer to a reassuring answer. The best always seem to lack conviction for the fight, and the worst are always filled with an inexhaustible reservoir of passionate intensity. “The goal of creating 50/50 gender parity in prestigious fields is a simple-minded fantasy, and even if it could be achieved, nothing important would be solved by doing so” — I can say this only because I’m a nobody, beneath notice. It’s the truth, but it’s not the sort of truth anyone wants to endure painful consequences in order to defend. The willingness to inflict those consequences ends up deciding the matter. Has it ever been otherwise?

Theodore Dalrymple wrote a fascinating essay, “How to Read a Society,” in his book Our Culture, What’s Left of It. In it, he tells of a nineteenth-century French aristocrat, the Marquis de Custine, who visited Russia for three months and published his observations in a series of letters, later to become a book, under the title La Russie en 1839. Particularly noteworthy was his diagnosis of a cultural malaise owing to the propensity to deceive and be deceived. One of the unspoken customs prevalent during Custine’s visit was for Russians to refuse to look at the palace where the Czar’s father, Paul, had been murdered. Similarly, no previous Czar was ever mentioned in conversation, in order to avoid implying that the current Czar was mortal. As Dalrymple writes:

Custine appreciated only too well the violence that this remaking of history did to the minds of men, and the consequences it had for their character and behavior. In order not to look at the palace in which the emperor Paul was murdered, a person had to know that he was killed there; but his whole purpose in not looking at the palace was to demonstrate in public his ignorance of the murder. He thus had not only to assert a lie but also to deny that he knew it was a lie. And all officials — the emperor included — had likewise to pretend that they did not know they were being lied to, or else the whole edifice of falsehood would have come tumbling down.

The need always to lie and always to avoid the truth stripped everyone of what Custine called “the two greatest gifts of God — the soul and the speech which communicates it.” People become hypocritical, cunning, mistrustful, cynical, silent, cruel and indifferent to the fate of others as a result of the destruction of their own souls. Moreover the upkeep of systematic untruth requires a network of spies; indeed, it requires that everyone become a spy and potential informer. And “the spy,” wrote Custine, “believes only in espionage, and if you escape his snares he believes that he is about to fall into yours.” The damage to personal relations was incalculable.

If Custine were among us now, he would recognize the evil of political correctness at once, because of the violence that it does to people’s souls by forcing them to say or imply what they do not believe but must not question. Custine would demonstrate to us that, without an external despot to explain our pusillanimity, we have willingly adopted the mental habits of people who live under a totalitarian dictatorship.

The avenues of the web are indeed filled with snitches and cops. Most of us are learning to keep our heads down and mouths shut as a result. As Dalrymple noted elsewhere, the purpose of political correctness is to humiliate, not to persuade. It forces you to become complicit in your own confinement, to lose self-respect and thus become more easily controlled. Death by a thousand little white lies.

So what can you do when a customer wants a book that you not only find objectionable but also believe actually dangerous in the lessons it portends amidst such a politically precarious time? If it helps, swap Elegy for any book that you find particularly insidious, whether it’s Atlas Shrugged, The Communist Manifesto, or The Bible. The question remains: without stooping to the level of crazed book-burning, does the bookseller’s role ever evolve past the capitalist exchange of money for paper and pulp? And are there meaningful ways to resist the continued sales of disastrous books?

Koziol has a problem. When he’s not playing to perfection the role of a Smug, Condescending Progressive straight out of central casting, he’s a bookseller, you see, and he’s distraught over the fact that even the “largely liberal, well-educated and well-meaning people” who patronize his store insist on seeking out such subversive thoughtcrime as, uh, J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. What to do, what to do? Well, eventually our hero grudgingly concedes that there’s nothing he can do except to “start conversations” and listen “without judgment” as customers explain why they would even want to waste their time with such trash, but given his druthers, he would prefer to strangle distribution of the book by boycotting Vance’s publisher. Unfortunately, sigh, that doesn’t seem feasible. A question of tactics, not principle, you understand. But it’s so trying for him, having to stand by silently while all around him, people are making choices without consulting him first!

It’s hard to pick a favorite part. Is it the idea that a typical customer would be the slightest bit interested in justifying their purchase to some obnoxious employee demanding an explanation? Is it the demonstration, yet again, that would-be censors and commissars unfailingly assume that they will always be the ones with the power to decide what gets promoted and what goes down the memory hole? Is it the way, as already noted, that zealots like Koziol can’t even trust their “liberal, well-educated and well-meaning” peers to handle anything from the progressive Index Librorum Prohibitorum without supervision? For me, I think it’s the way he offers up alternative candidates for censorship as a “gotcha” — he apparently blithely assumes that everyone else is as much of a control freak as he is. Hell, one of the first books I ever sold was one of Ayn Rand’s novels. I even sold a copy of Mein Kampf on Hitler’s birthday. Free speech and free markets, baby, let the best ideas win!

What’s clear is that the people buying from you and working for you want to know if you’re on their side. Or not. They want to know if you’re doing something to make the world better. Or not. And they will reward — or ignore or perhaps even boycott — you accordingly.

This is our new marketing reality, and cultural values are marketing’s new table stakes. Few are the brands who court controversy as a matter of strategy. But in today’s landscape, avoiding taking sides and bringing your cultural values to life to avoid controversy is a fast track to irrelevance.

Yes, “doing well by doing good” is a decades-old truism. But showing the world what you stand for (and occasionally against) is now as important, efficient and effective an eyeball-grabbing platform as exists. To win today’s battles for attention — as in, relevance, engagement, resource allocation and return — you’d better let people know whose side you’re on.

Today, brands can be neither quiet, defensive nor isolated. They have to be proactive, and they have to stand for something — for both the world’s and their own good.

Is this what American Buddhism has come to? Has it become an entirely partisan endeavor? Is American Buddhism now indistinguishable from Leftist politics? Maybe that’s overstating things. But it genuinely worries me that we may be headed in that direction.

…There is a strong assumption among American Buddhists that if you believe in peace and the oneness of humankind, as the Buddha taught, then you would surely follow the political philosophy of the American Left. After all, Leftists are for love and light, and against war and badness. Conservatives stand for hate, killing, and carnage.

I used to believe that myself. But I don’t anymore.

Yuval Levin — whose new book is excellent, by the way — once noted something almost stunning in its unacknowledged obviousness: we are all liberals. That is, no one of importance wants to bring back monarchy, a landed aristocracy, or feudalism. No one of importance wants to live under communist or fascist dictatorship. Right-wingers and left-wingers alike agree on the importance of individual freedom, representative government, pluralism, rule of law, etc. And yet, political debate is like a think tank built right on top of the active fault line of psychology. However genteel the arguments, however many presuppositions and goals shared in common, it takes very little for tribal instincts to inflate any difference of opinion to apocalyptic proportions. The narcissism of small differences, Freud called it. And so, in modern American politics, the progressive wing of liberalism and the conservative wing of liberalism are both convinced that to let the other wing near power would be the prelude to Armageddon. The only cure for it, so far as I can see, is the perspective granted by time. Live long enough and pay attention, and you’ll soon become desensitized to the constant state of red alert. Your adrenal glands or your interest will give out once you realize that some, perhaps many, people just aren’t content unless they’re running around screaming with their hair on fire. Both sides are permanently convinced that the other side controls everything and are moments away from unleashing catastrophe, regardless of who is currently in power. There is no political answer to this absurd state of affairs, only a personal one — just walk away. Stop wallowing in outrage and go enjoy the many good things in life beyond politics.

Brad, as I recently feared would happen, is experiencing the same thing I did several years ago as a basically liberal-leaning fellow with an interest in religion and atheism. He’s seeing his Buddhist subculture become increasingly dominated by the same sort of militant left-wingers that insisted on fusing New Atheism to New Left identity politics, and he feels compelled to call it what it is. Being a figure of slight prominence in American Buddhism, however, he has attracted the sort of vengefulness that comes from people who use politics as an outlet for their borderline personality disorders and who are not prepared to tolerate opposition. In this case, someone has publicized the fact that Brad has a nephew who writes for conservative outlets and is a Trump supporter. In the hysterical world of online leftism, the suspicion of even a germ of thoughtcrime means that the suspect must be socially quarantined and assumed guilty by association until proven innocent. If Brad had any money or influence, he’d probably be subjected to an economic embargo to starve him into submission as well.

Buddhism in America, popularized by the baby boomers as part of their general fascination with all things exotic and mystical that promise liberation from supposedly-stultifying Western norms, has long been part of that progressive cultural orbit, so it should be no surprise, in my opinion, to see it influenced by the latest trends among culture-war reenactors. The image of Buddhist monks self-immolating to protest the Vietnam War still serves as an inspirational example of authentic political commitment among leftists. The very least modern Buddhists can do is flame a few Trump supporters on social media.

Thankfully, though, Buddhism has a self-defense mechanism built into it to prevent it from becoming a wholly-owned subsidiary of partisan politics. Sitting quietly and meditating about the inherent illusoriness of existence has a way of eventually undermining rigid dogmas. Sincere practitioners will likely grow past this kind of shallow, politically-engaged Buddhism. I wouldn’t call myself a conservative any more than I would call myself a Buddhist, even though I’ve learned a lot from both, because the most important thing that I’ve learned is to be suspicious of labels and narratives. Buddhism had always taught me that we create much of our own misery by believing too strongly in the illusory solidity of our identity, and the intersectional leftist drama of the last several years taught me that the easiest way to destroy your own intellectual integrity is to identify too strongly with a political tribe. Retaining the ability to shift perspective is what allows us to see when we’re getting ready to go to war over a trivial difference and change our behavior accordingly.

You’ve heard me say it before, and no doubt I will have to say it many more times: there’s no neutral ground in a holy war.

Lord knows that humans need no special incentive to indulge in tribalism. Protecting the in-group and attacking the out-group is one of the most deeply-engrained instincts in the species of chimpanzee that made good. As numerousexperiments have shown, even the most trivial and nonsensical distinctions can turn formerly peaceable people into bloodthirsty enemies.

It’s easy enough to shrug off these latest exercises in public shaming and forced political awareness on the assumption that of course pop music superstars and Fortune 500 companies will attract this kind of unhinged, obsessive attention. But rest assured that the only thing preventing these righteous crusaders from reintroducing a modern version of impressment for the culture wars is the problem of logistics, not the lack of desire. They would gladly conscript nobodies like you or I as well if they could.

Again, it’s incredibly easy for any human to reduce a complex issue to a Manichean battle between the saved and the damned. But this particular type of totalitarian impulse, to completely obliterate the idea that anything could be allowed to escape the gravitational pull of partisan politics, is especially appealing to left-wingers. It is axiomatic for conservative philosophy that there will always be a certain amount of imperfection and injustice in the world, and a sane response to this fact entails that people have to allow some sort of cultural or personal space to forget about crusading. At five o’clock, the whistle blows, and we set the bare-knuckle political brawling aside until the next day, like Sam and Ralph. There are more important things to concern ourselves with, better sources of solace like family and art to occupy ourselves with, and the fight will never be conclusively won anyway.

But to the progressive equivalent of theocracy, the idea of a “secular” space, free from political considerations, is heretical. Unsupervised free spaces like that are a breeding ground for subversive, reactionary ideas. For a political philosophy that accepts no inherent limits on mankind’s ability to perfect itself, the very existence of imperfection and injustice is an affront to its deepest identity. The grinding years of imperfect life cannot be forgiven. If something inherent in the world makes it incapable of being custom-fit to the Procrustean beds of reformers and revolutionaries, and provides no satisfying outlet for their utopian energies, they will eventually tire of vainly flinging themselves against the bars of their cage and start releasing their frustration on others unfortunate enough to be within reach. This is what we see here — in a world which, to them, seems to have gone completely insane, in opposition to all their wishes, they are reduced to lashing out against people guilty of standing by too innocently. In their desire to perfect the world through politics, they would destroy the oases of individual privacy and freedom that make this imperfect world bearable at all.

I write in my notebook with the intention of stimulating good conversation, hoping that it will also be of use to some fellow traveler. But perhaps my notes are mere drunken chatter, the incoherent babbling of a dreamer. If so, read them as such.

Vox Populi

The prose is immaculate. [You] should be an English teacher…Do keep writing; you should get paid for it, but that’s hard to find.

—Noel

You are such a fantastic writer! I’m with Noel; your mad writing skills could lead to income.

—Sandi

WOW – I’m all ready to yell “FUCK YOU MAN” and I didn’t get through the first paragraph.

—Anonymous

You strike me as being too versatile to confine yourself to a single vein. You have such exceptional talent as a writer. Your style reminds me of Swift in its combination of ferocity and wit, and your metaphors manage to be vivid, accurate and original at the same time, a rare feat. Plus you’re funny as hell. So, my point is that what you actually write about is, in a sense, secondary. It’s the way you write that’s impressive, and never more convincingly than when you don’t even think you’re writing — I mean when you’re relaxed and expressing yourself spontaneously.

—Arthur

Posts like yours would be better if you read the posts you critique more carefully…I’ve yet to see anyone else misread or mischaracterize my post in the manner you have.

—Battochio

You truly have an incredible gift for clear thought expressed in the written word. You write the way people talk.